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Mobbed isn’t too dramatic a word to describe the first Gluten Free Expo in Vancouver last year. Ask Margaret Dron, the organizer. She wasn’t exactly trampled by crowds at the Croatian Cultural Centre but she sure was wide-eyed in disbelief. She expected maybe 500 people, tops, but 3,000 showed up. “It was shocking,” says Dron. “It was all word of mouth because I had no budget for advertising.”

Earlier this year, she did it again but with a mob preparedness plan. “We booked space at the Vancouver Convention Centre. In my head, I thought we’d hopefully get 3,000 to 5,000,” she says. Oops! Some 25,000 people showed up and were not amused by the resulting chaos.

It was both distressing and serendipitous for Dron. She “dropped everything,” meaning her career as a strategic marketing professional, to take the Gluten Free Expo national and it’s now in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. But Vancouverites, she says, are the most passionate about gluten free eating.

“For sure, we’re very health conscious, very aware of how to be stronger and better. People are asking vendors whether their products are GMO free, organic and what super foods are in them. I love it. It’s fantastic and I’m proud to be a Vancouverite,” says Dron.

Her experience is borne out by a recent Canadian survey conducted by Udi’s, a U.S. gluten free giant (the second largest brand in the world with $95.2 million in sales this year, up from $5 million in 2009). The survey showed about 12 per cent of Canadians are shunning or reducing gluten in their diets and that B.C. led the way with 17 per cent having reduced or eliminated gluten; some had gluten intolerance or allergy and others said they feel better without it. Bread was the most challenging food to eliminate and about a quarter cheated with bread.

An article in the B.C. Medical Journal earlier this year, however, was cautious of some self-diagnosed gluten allergies. “Some people say that they feel better after eliminating gluten from their diet but it is usually because the gluten laden processed food removed from their diet has been replaced with basic, nutrient-dense whole foods,” wrote Drs. Kathleen Cadenhead and Margo Sweeny.

On the other hand, nutritionists warn of overly processed gluten free products. It’s tempting to buy processed treats because baking with gluten free flour is challenging.

Still, businesses are rushing in to feed the incredible demand for gluten free eating. The Gluten Free Epicurean café and bakery in East Vancouver is but one of them. Owner Delainy Mackie hasn’t been tested for celiac but she knows a small amount of gluten can send her to the hospital. Sixteen years ago, when it became clear she couldn’t tolerate any amount of wheat, she went on a rice cracker and soup diet because it wasn’t such a gluten-free-friendly world back then.

“I’m a big food person. It’s what drove me to open this place,” she says. (She sold her baked goods at Farmers’ Markets before opening The Gluten Free Epicurean.) There are now a number of gluten free stores and cafés and it’s no longer an ordeal to live without wheat. Stores like Choices Market — which has a separate gluten free bakery facility, free of gluten contamination — have a huge array of alternative flours like tapioca, potato, sorghum, sweet rice, almond, buckwheat, oat, brown rice, chickpea, garbanzo, coconut, amaranth, millet, quinoa, teff, and kamut.

Mackie says it’s best to buy flours pre-packed in gluten free facilities to avoid contamination. She avoids oat flour unless it’s labelled wheat-free as oat is often processed in facilities that also process wheat, barley and rye.

She mostly uses a mix of organic brown rice flour mixed with tapioca starch. “My mom and my aunt taught me the basics and they’re hippie health conscious,” she says. “Growth has been crazy. I haven’t done any advertising. I’m letting it grow naturally,” says the self-taught cook and baker.

Sales, she says, have doubled since last year.

If you figure gluten free baking to be leaden, yet falling apart if you look at it sideways and worse, tasting like sawdust, Lemonade Gluten Free Bakery, on Cambie Street, will enlighten you on what’s possible. Owner Tracy Kadonoff, a 20-year pastry chef has appended her training with courses in Paris and at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America).

I brought some of her products — a lemon meringue tart, apple crostata, chocolate campfire cupcake, chocolate cookie and a chocolate cherry brioche — into the newsroom for a taste test. The group included someone with celiac disease, someone who is almost totally gluten free for general health reasons, someone on the lookout for good gluten free products because his wife can’t tolerate it and two people, including myself who eat anything and everything.

“Outstanding,” said the celiac colleague. “The pastry on the lemon meringue pie and apple strudel was as close to traditional pastry as I’ve had. And, where other gluten free bakeries tend to compensate with butter and sugar, everything we tried was relatively light, flaky and not too sweet. Delicious!”

Testers couldn’t distinguish them from regular pastries. “They were on a par with the very best traditional bakeries,” said another. “They were distinguishable only by virtue of their superior flavour.” The only exception was the chocolate cookie which was more crumbly than ideal but still had great flavour.

“All in all, it’s hard to believe how light everything was despite being gluten free,” said another colleague. “The real show stealer was the lemon meringue tart which was just flat-out amazing.”

So there you go. Gluten free is coming out of its dark era. And so is Kadonoff who, two years ago, discovered the reason for her extreme eczema was wheat. “I was so itchy I wanted to rip my skin off. By the time I figured it out, I had eczema from head to toe. It drove me absolutely insane.” She stopped eating wheat but airborne particles at the bakery affected her. Much to her distress, she quit. “It was devastating and I was lost. Being a pastry chef was all I wanted to be.”

She started experimenting with gluten free baking and friends and family (with no gluten issues) wanted more. And that’s how her gluten free bakery was born. Her coconut lemon mousse and chocolate caramel silk torte look no different than desserts she made while working at Sweet Obsession Cakes and Pastries.

While she’s mastered gluten free versions of almost everything she made at Sweet Obsession, she doesn’t hold out hope for croissants. A multitude of croissant-deprived people would be bawling their eyes out with joy, should she find a way to make the shattery, flaky croissant. “It’s finicky. I’ve never been able to do it. They’re rock hard. It needs that gluten to hold on to butter and give flakiness and the layers.”

Her 20-plus years of experience and knowledge went into creating the right flour blends to mimic products close to the wheat-based versions. (She also sells a blended all-purpose non-gluten flour for home cooks.)

She uses a lot of sorghum in her blends. “Alone, it’s too dense and too strong. It needs lightening with rice flour. Starches provide binding qualities, moisture absorption. Xantham gum is necessary to help with structure. It makes such a difference if it’s omitted,” she says.

She hasn’t come across a lot of gluten free products and recipes she likes although she’s noticed a big improvement in the past year alone. For those wanting to bake gluten free, she recommends using regular recipes and subbing pre-mixed non-gluten flour (Bob’s Red Mill flour blend is widely available).

“You usually have to increase the amount of flour by a little bit to get more structure if you’re substituting. I generally add about 10 per cent more. You definitely have to add a gum like xantham gum in, usually between a half teaspoon to three-quarters of a teaspoon per cup of flour. It’s expensive but it’s really needed. I’ve done that with a lot of recipes and found great success. Some, I’ve tweaked.”

Arlene Kennedy, of mygoodnessglutenfree! teaches how to bake gluten free. “The No. 1 thing is psychological. Everything you knew about baking has to be cast aside. It’s a world unto itself and you need a new set of skills,” she says. “A lot try it, don’t recognize that it’s different and give up.”

She says it’s important to follow recipes even though it sounds unusual and not to expect results to be the same as with wheat-based baking. “I’ve made 3,000 little carrot cakes, that’s been touted as the best gluten free in Vancouver. I’ve put in a batch of eight at a time and get eight different ones. That’s the nature of the beast. Sometimes it might look a little ugly but as long as it tastes good, it’s OK.”

Smak, a new gluten free fast food café in Downtown Vancouver uses Lemonade’s bread, toasted, to make sandwiches and sells her cookies and bars.

“Health was the No. 1 priority for us and that took us so close to being gluten free, we thought we might as well change a couple of menu items and make ourselves entirely gluten free,” says owner Brendan Ladner.

“Truthfully, people sometimes confuse gluten free for healthy food. It’s not always the case,” he says.

Ingredients are more expensive, he says, and even though most of his customers aren’t celiac, he’ll get the soy sauce without wheat that costs ten times more than the conventional one.

(A Dalhousie University Medical School study showed that gluten free products were, on average, 242 per cent more expensive than their regular counterparts.)

Dron thinks she’s ready for the 2014 Gluten Free Expo, being held January 25 and 26. She’s doubled the space and added another day. “This year, we’ve put in strong systems to cap the number of tickets. Literally, it’s just me and my dog who run this company. He’s on a grain-free diet.”

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